19 November 2016

In her work Amanda Airs uses her personal experience of being in the landscape to create large disorientating abstract installations. Using repetition and hi-key tones she is able to create strong optical effects in particular perception of motion and spatial ambiguity. When applied to a large area Amanda uses the disorienting nature of the work to increase spatial awareness and to convey a heightened experience of being in the landscape.

The work “whizzing Tinge” portrays the landscape, not as a representational depiction but as an examination of the interplay of light and colour of moving elements in the landscape. This work takes inspiration from a small but beautiful event in the landscape, when autumn leaves are lifted into the air by a gust of wind. As the leaves flicker back and forth, a multitude of colours are revealed on either side of the leaves. It is hoped that the moving elements in this work and the use of wind will trigger a memory or a sensation of being in the landscape and experiencing one of these tiny events.

Sue Pedley and Virginia Hilyard frequently collaborate but this exhibition takes us back to their individual practices. More importantly it explores the beginnings of the technical image itself, in the threshold space of its emergence. In this work, both artists explore what we could call ‘the analogue digital’ in a direct use of digits (fingers) in this thoroughly hands-on media archeology.

Pedley’s ‘Blueprint’ evokes not only a history of the photographic image, but also a history of technical drawing, in the projective sketches of architects’ and surveyors’ plan-making. The blue intensity of the cyanotype has its origins in the long development of colour and in this case, the 1704 appearance of Prussian Blue – the first modern synthetically-produced colour, arriving as an accident of experiment. Wait a few years and along comes photography and the cyanotype, developed in Sir John Herschel’s chemical experiments and appearing for the first time in 1842 in Anna Atkins’ photograms. The molecular structures, aerial topographies and patterns seen under a microscope that are suggested in this series of Pedley’s cyanotypes directly reference this history, adding to it, painting lines on the surface. The images in their fugitive quality evoke the ephemeral image, suggestive of another Herschel ‘siderotype’: the ‘breath print’, a mixture of ferro-tartaric acid and silver nitrate. After exposure, no image appeared until someone came along and breathed on the print and the moisture of breath oxidized the iron, activating the latent image.

Virginia Hilyard returns us to the materiality of cinema and precisely to the logic of montage: to the splice, that very intersection of frames combining one scene and another and the process of holding them together. By focusing on and enlarging this moment, the material base of the image appears in its luminous translucency as abstract composition. It is only in the stillness of these images of time frozen that an otherwise invisible picture is able to appear in the diversity of random components and contents. This abstraction of the cinematic image at the degree-zero point of movement brings us face to face with the underlying chemical nature of filmic processes, less visible now in the even more abstract nanoscopic structures of digital image-making. What Hilyard’s images capture in its essence is the pure potential of movement, that moment when the image is animated in the juxtaposition of frames moving. It is a metaphor too of the beginning of life itself in the recombinant form of cells sharing parts of each other to form a new organism. This is foregrounded in the title, Picture Start, words that appear on film leader in their insistent modernist command.

Both bodies of work are located at the ‘picture start’ point, when the image itself comes into existence. Both bodies of work have a regenerative/recombinant quality, re-using materials to produce new life forms, or in this case, we might perhaps say, movement-images.

REAL FAKE charts the uncertain terrain between surface and substance: between material and the representation of material. The works shown use vernacular substances – vinyl, laminated flooring and prefabricated steel which emphasis surface – aspirational, shiny, new. Wood and stone are doubled, domesticated and performed on the surface of composite materials.

Playing with modes of display, wall and floor works will speculate – re-modeling familiar surfaces, platforms and spaces. But rather than the asserting the confidence of belonging, these materials will be nervous, awkward and slightly embarrassed – fugitives from the display home

7 September 2016

In this series of photographs Mark visits the pristine cliffs of Kurnell with good friend & Iyengar yoga teacher Robyn Adler. The work addresses the question, How do we make authentic connections & long standing relationships with & within the landscape around us? Are we losing our sense of self in a world of “here today, and gone tomorrow” or perhaps more fittingly “here this second, gone the next”.

Shot on Mark's old Hasselblad 500C/M camera for a happy reunion after many years, the process attempts to reach back to an authentic experience with the photographic medium and similarly, addresses the power of authentic human engagement with the natural landscape. In an alluring way the two carry out a friendly scrimmage. Robyn is almost lost to her sublime surrounds, but somehow manages to cut a rock solid & graceful form amidst alluring odds. This is a spiritual relationship in it’s purist form; bare feet on rocks, image on film & a constantly changing ocean.

BIO

Born, 1981, Kyogle NSW. Lives and works Sydney.

Mark grew up on the north coast of NSW in the coastal town of Yamba. He moved to Sydney to study art & graduated from the College of Fine Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts HONS in 2005.

After a decade long career in advertising (scouting locations for photographic shoots & TV commercials) Mark decided to pursue another lifelong passion. He became a qualified personal trainer in 2015 and is now founding his own lifestyle management business.

Allometric represents Marks love for human movement, the natural world & a creative practice in photography by reverting to a largely non digital practice in a heavily image saturated digital world. The discipline, strength & lightness of Robyn’s Iyengar yoga practice played a pivotal role in the creative process.

“I took a very quiet & uncomplicated approach to this work. It was as much about getting back into my art making & as a collaboration with Robyn. In fact I feel like these photographs are as much her works as they are mine. I felt more like an observer marvelling at the organic & spiritual way she interacted with the extraordinary landscape”.

23 August 2016

The presented body of work is a series of drawings created as a personal diary over the course of 2 months. They are all created on A4 sized pieces of paper in a range of styles and mediums. It is a continuation of a newly formed interest in the pros and cons of the image over the 3-dimensional, but more importantly it is a return to working with introspective concepts. As an excerpt from the wall text states: “They portray something which I am still apprehensive to speak about openly and a matter which I’m still trying to figure out personally. They allow me to sort things through and express what I’m tossing over mentally and physically through art rather than words and that is the significance of this body of work.”

Each day Rox De Luca goes gleaning along her local beach, Bondi, Sydney. She is looking for flashes of colour or of whiteness against the sand, the signs that the beach—like every beach on the planet, sadly—is adjusting fragment by fragment to the deluge of plastic waste that our species generates daily. She collects the weather-worn and -shaped fragments, rebirthing them slowly from the sand, and she takes them home to clean and to categorize by size, colour and shape. Then the painstaking transformations take place…

De Luca’s works are humbling in their insistent reminder of our destructive, wasteful propensities. Vast gyres or garbage dumps of plastic and other debris have formed in the world’s major oceans. Some 90 percent of the debris to be found on Australia’s beaches is plastic: bottles, bottle tops, straws. A January 2016 World Economic Forum report forecasts that in the middle of this century our oceans will hold less fish than plastics. And—as De Luca’s gleaning intimates—plastics are vying with sand itself to form the core constituent of the planet’s beaches. De Luca wants her audience to intuit something of these displacements, and the vastness of their scale, when viewing the reformulated results of her gleaning for plastic, on the beach.

17 April 2016

An historic collection of cultural artefacts - the common tea towel, the CHUX® wipe, the shower curtain (Motif #7) – and the paintings, it is said, that inspired them.

Image: Ida Lawrence, Pale Imitation (Blue and White Zigzags).

Pale Imitations continues Ida Lawrence’s interest in fabricating objects, images, and the stories behind them. Through fiction and subversion, she creates alternative histories for, and new interpretations of, the ordinary and everyday.

In her recent practice, and while painting the patterned works in this exhibition, she has been thinking about the relationship between imperfection and expression, failure and beauty, what they “look like”, and how they are defined within and by different contexts.

In Pale Imitations, Lawrence juxtaposes patterned paintings with similarly patterned mass-produced domestic objects to pose the questions: Which can be called original? And can one really be said to be inferior or superior to the other?

10 March 2016

This show presents an
object oriented/externalist practice in which the object is conceived as
correlated with a field of external relations curatorial practices are part of.

The externalist
perspective based in process philosophy has split away from the assumption the
object preexists its practical external relationships. But such a switch
implies that the problem before being formal needs first to account for a
paradigmatic background and data-mapping guiding observation. A new way of
looking at a common form replaces the ability form has in providing a base for
its own renewal.

The furtherance of
radical abstract painting's object-tendency by bracketing the object and
suspending its internality up to a shift point is a methodological condition
for observing an external field of reciprocal causation the object
instantaneously coexists with and for unfolding it along different timelines. A
virtual (nonetheless real) field that is to the object what mind is to
consciousness in perceiving that object.

Considering both the
object and its external field as two locally exclusive but complementary
dimensions of a same work, the structural division between art and the
curatorial becomes a means for their unification.

#8 is the latest of
Margaret Roberts' reconstructions of Katarzyna
Kobro'sSpatial Composition
2of 1928, made as an enlarged
wall drawing. Her seven earlier reconstructions made in 2015 are shown here. She is remaking
this work partly because Katarzyna was one of the early constructivist artists
who, well before the consequences of the devaluation of place became so
apparent in climate change, worked towards its revaluation by giving place an
important role in their work. Katarzyna explained her approach to space in 1929
as:

Sculpture is a part of the space in which it is located. [...] Sculpture
enters space and space enters the sculpture. The spatiality of its
construction, the connection between sculpture and space, force sculpture to
reveal the sincere truth of its existence. That is why there should be no
random shapes in sculpture. There should be only those shapes that position it
towards space by connecting with it.

The 8th reconstruction of Spatial Composition 2will
be made in ash on the existing wall of ArticulateUpstairs. The
ash is in part a memorial for the recent loss of the World Heritage-listed
ancient Gondwana ecosystem in Tasmania. Much of this area was burned to ash
following unusually dry weather and electrical storms in January 2016, each of
which scientists attribute to climate change, as you can read here.

ArticulateUpstairs is a separate initiative within Articulate project space that usually runs an independent program, and is sometimes part of a project space program. It is the mezzanine space on the first floor of the Articulate building.